» third person shooter

Dead Space is out in less than a week, we are presented with yet another impressive animated comic movie trailer from Gametrailers.com. This month is going to be one busy AND expensive month for me with all these great games coming out.

First impression the sci-fi third person shooter Fracture gives me is that it is very Mass Effect-ish. The first half of the demo allows you to get used to the controls, the environment and lets you test out the different weapons of the game.

The controls are pretty somewhat straight forward but slightly different. R1, R2, L1, L2 are all for weapons. Triangle button is for sprinting which shows a very nice blur effect to simulate running. As usual, the square is for reload and cross is jump. L3 is crouch and R3 is zoom. I was expecting some close range one hit kill like the knife in Call of Duty but there isn’t any, at least in the demo.

The environment looks amazing with detailed textures. As the first half of the demo, you get to try out the weapons. Two features that are pretty important in this game and are actually very innovative – raise and lower terrains with your weapon and two types of grenades. You will know where to raise or lower the terrains by looking for the corresponding symbol around the area you need to manipulate. Unfortunately there’s a limit to how high or how low you can manipulate. The effects of terrain manipulation are impressive, even more so if you use grenades to do the job! Aside from moving from place to place, raising or lowering terrains also help you during battles. For example, if you lower an area, you have yourself a trench and if you raise an area, you will have yourself a shield for a while from all the gun fire.

The standard rifle that starts you off in the demo is pretty “standard” and doesn’t give a powerful impression. The Black Widow on the other hand, can enable you to shoot up to 6 grenades that you can detonate all at once. Then there is the pulse sniper rifle which is pretty common (Unreal Tournament comes to mind).

There aren’t too many sci fi third person shooters in the next gen consoles yet, well at least not for PlayStation 3 unlike XBox 360 which has Gears of War 1 (2 coming out soon) and Mass Effect to name a few. I’m not sure if its worth buying, more of rental to me. I rather wait for Dead Space even though it doesn’t have online mode. But then again, if you have a PS3, do give the demo a try, maybe you might just like it! Just not quite my cup of tea.